Over the last 10 years I have developed an extensive keyword heirarchy. I will often go to images from years back and add new key words based on keywords added to recent work. What I have done is open the folder in bridge, click on keywords in the keywords tab and then select the photos where I want to add more recent keywords. I then put a check mark in the box next to the keyword I want to add and bridge adds the keyword to the file.

Yesterday when I tried to do that my heirarchy had disappeared. The generic bridge heirarchy is there and whatever keywords I orginally selected are there, but they are no longer in the categories I so painstakingly created over the last 10 years. I assume that whatever happened is now irreversable and that I will need to revisit each and every image I've taken over the last 10 years to retag them. I'm sick about this but am hoping someone can at least tell me there is a way to recreate the originally heirarchy once and have it applied to all my folders. If I can't do that then I will not only have to re keyword each image, I will have to recreate the keyword heirarchy for each folder. Very, depressing.

As they say in the papers "sorry for your loss". But seriously don't think all is lost.

I would reset the prefences to see if you just got a glitch. Hold down Crtl key and start Bridge. Will get a reset windown with 3 options.

If that does not work, go to C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge CS5. Click on the keywords fle. Note: appdata is a hidden file.

If you get this back I strongly suggest you occasionally make a backup of your keywords to a seperate file. In the keywords panel click in upper right corner to get drop down box. Select Export and save file.

Thanks but that didn't work. When I click on the keywords file as you suggested, all that I get are the standard keywords that ship with PS5. When I tried exporting my keywords from bridge the saved file only contained the adobe categories. All the key words are there and if I orignally coded key words in custom parent categories they are there too. But none of the changes and additons I've made over the years remain. Even if I could copy the keywords, the categories are different for each folder. That's why I was hoping for a way to rebuild my categories just once and apply them to all folders, i.e., replace the standard adobe categories and sub categories with my own.

It is odd that the keywords are there and yet they don't appear when i try to copy them. Maybe my custom file is somewhere else and for some reason is not being read. What is really troubling is that this was fine a week ago.

Do you have any other version of Bridge? If so open it and hopefull it should have the corrrect heirarchy. Then export the keyword file and copy to CS5.. Or go in and copy the keywords.xml file and then past in CS5.

Not a computer guy, but perhaps you can reset the computer to a set point before this happened?

I only have one copy of Bridge (that I know of). Even though I have spent all day working through my files re-creating the categories and in some cases, keywords, the keywords xml file only contains a random smattering of keywords and categories. I estimate it will take more than a month working 2-3 hours a day to re-create my keyword heirarchy if I have to do one folder at a time.

If my system would allow me to create a copy of all my keywords, maybe I could paste them into the appropriate categories and then re-paste into Bridge, but I the keyword xml file is not anything like what shows up as keywords in my image folders. In fact, it just may represent only the last folder I was working on. I’ll have to check that out tomorrow.

You mentioned others have had this problem. Do you have any links to discussions? I'd like to create a file on this issue.

Thanks again. I upgraded from CS3 and deleted that version once CS5 was up and running. I’m going to try to “export cache” today to see if that works.

To reiterate for anyone else who may read this discussion, all the information is there, somewhere, but the keywords are no longer organized in categories and the categories no longer show up in folders unless the keyword/category exists in the folder I am working with. This makes it impossible to simply click and add keywords to files without recreating new categories/keywords for each of my folders.